The other day, I came across a post from a B2B SaaS “Content Leader” announcing that her company was looking to hire a content coordinator. It was polished. Thoughtful. Earnest. The kind of post that signals growth, momentum, and seriousness about marketing.

It was also painfully familiar.

I left a simple comment.

“What if you didn’t?”

That question tends to land like a record scratch. Not because it’s aggressive—but because it challenges an assumption so deeply embedded in modern business that most people don’t even realize it’s an assumption. Nearly every company today believes that if they want better marketing results, they need more people producing more content more consistently.

That belief is wrong.

And it’s costing companies millions.

The Staffing Myth That Won’t Die

There is an almost universal belief—across startups, SaaS companies, and enterprise brands alike—that social media and content marketing require a growing staff to manage them. Coordinators. Managers. Strategists. Editors. Specialists. Agencies layered on top of internal teams. Calendars. Schedules. Meetings to discuss meetings.

The logic seems sound on the surface. If content matters, then someone must manage it. If platforms demand consistency, then labor must increase. If engagement drops, then output must go up.

But this logic misunderstands what social media actually is.

And more importantly, it misunderstands what marketing is supposed to do.

How Marketing Lost the Plot

If you rewind to the mid-2000s, you’ll find the origin of this confusion. Marketing departments treated social media like an unruly cousin—something awkward, unpredictable, and slightly embarrassing. Org charts literally read “Marketing AND Social Media.” As if the two were incompatible substances. Oil and water.

That framing poisoned everything that came after.

Social media was never a channel separate from marketing. It was never “content distribution.” It was never about posting frequency or hashtags or optimal times to publish. Social media was the first large-scale proof that humans will voluntarily market themselves if you give them the right environment to do so.

Marketing strategy should have absorbed that lesson immediately.
Instead, marketing departments bolted social media onto legacy systems that were designed for billboards, mailers, and magazine ads. They treated it like a louder megaphone instead of a behavioral engine. They focused on output instead of incentives. They measured activity instead of outcomes.

And two decades later, even the most senior CMOs are still building strategies from inherited playbooks.

When Busy Work Becomes the Business Model

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: many marketing departments exist primarily to validate their own existence.

That may sound harsh, but sit with it for a moment.

How often do you see marketing teams rewarded for reducing effort? For simplifying systems? For automating themselves out of day-to-day execution? Almost never.
Instead, value is demonstrated through motion. Through dashboards. Through content calendars. Through campaigns that require dozens of internal approvals and generate PowerPoint decks instead of revenue.

Even top CMOs fall into this trap. They follow trends because trends are safe. They replicate what worked at the last company because that’s defensible. They build teams that look impressive on LinkedIn because headcount signals importance.

But very few are willing to ask the only question that matters:
Is this converting into dollars?

A Lesson From Wendy’s That Marketing Forgot

One of my earliest mentors was John Pietro, former head of marketing for Wendy’s and the mind behind the combo meal and the legendary “Where’s the beef?” campaign.

At one point, he told me something that permanently recalibrated how I think about marketing.

“I could have used half the budget.”

That wasn’t false humility. That was precision.

John wasn’t interested in marketing theater. He wasn’t building a department to protect salaries. He was focused on one thing: changing behavior at the register.

Convincing customers—who were already trained to order a burger—to add fries and a soda was not trivial. It required understanding human behavior, decision fatigue, pricing psychology, and habit formation.

If you grew up in the 1980s, you remember the line:
“Would you like fries and a soda with that?”

That single sentence reshaped fast-food economics.

So ask yourself: why is that kind of marketing so rare today?

Because most modern marketing doesn’t aim to change behavior. It aims to be seen.

The Pepsi Test (And Why It Fails)
Open up Pepsi’s social media feed. Or Coca-Cola’s. Or any global CPG brand.

What do you see?

Endless images of cans. Bottles. Celebrities holding cans. Bottles on ice. Bottles in hands. Bottles at parties.
Now ask yourself a brutally honest question: do you need to be reminded what a Pepsi can looks like?

Of course not.

So what is that marketing doing?

Nothing.

It’s not educating. It’s not converting. It’s not creating loyalty. It’s not amplifying customers. It’s brand narcissism masquerading as strategy.

And this is where the industry loses its footing completely—because while brands are shouting about “authenticity,” they are actively drowning out the only voices that actually matter: their customers’.

Customer-Centric Marketing Is Not Customer Service

Let’s clear something up.

Customer-centric marketing is not customer service. It is not tone of voice. It is not responding faster on social media. It is not adding empathy to copy.

Customer-centric marketing is a structural strategy.

It is the exact same strategy used by Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and every social platform that has scaled to billions of users.

They do not create content for you.

They create conditions where you want to create content for yourself.

And when you do, you become their marketer.

That’s the part brands consistently fail to see.

Before social media, we assumed Grandma wasn’t cool. Social platforms proved us wrong. Grandma didn’t just adopt the tools—she mastered them. She became a content creator. A network node. A distributor.

Not because she was trained.

Because the system rewarded her behavior.

Why Hiring a Content Coordinator Is the Wrong Instinct

When a company posts a job for a content coordinator, what they’re really saying is this:
“We believe visibility is a labor problem.”

It isn’t.

Visibility is a behavioral design problem.

You can hire ten people to post on your behalf and still fail—because posting is not the same as participation. And participation cannot be outsourced.

Most content teams exist to create motion, not momentum. They produce output. They chase engagement metrics divorced from revenue. They optimize for algorithms they don’t control.

And when results stagnate, leadership assumes the answer is more content, more staff, more budget.

That’s not strategy. That’s inertia.

The Question That Exposes Everything

Here is the simplest—and most revealing—exercise any CEO can perform.

Ask your CMO, VP of Marketing, or Head of Growth one question:
“What is our marketing strategy?”

Not your channel mix.
Not your posting cadence.
Not your tech stack.

Your strategy.

If the answer is a list of tactics, you don’t have a strategy.

If the answer sounds like industry jargon, you don’t have a strategy.

If the answer requires a slide deck, you don’t have a strategy.

At that point, you are paying for activity, not impact.

You would quite literally be better off asking your customers to invite their friends.

And I’m not being metaphorical.
What If You Didn’t?

So when I commented “What if you didn’t?” on that SaaS content leader’s post, I wasn’t being contrarian.

I was challenging the premise that more staff equals better marketing.

What if instead of hiring people to make noise, you built systems that rewarded customers for participation?

What if instead of managing content, you designed platforms that enabled self-promotion?

What if marketing stopped being a department and became infrastructure?

That is customer-centric marketing.
And until businesses understand that distinction, they will keep hiring coordinators to manage platforms they fundamentally don’t understand.

If you’re ready to stop performing marketing and start converting it into growth, you already know how to find me.